Sunday morn was a day when most members of the ton adhered to at least a pretend civility and decorum. Having been born a bastard, Vail had never been saddled with lessons on the reasons or need for pretend—anything. Nor had he ever cared about how the world viewed him and he certainly hadn’t coveted one of those titles he’d eventually be saddled with anyway. To Adrina Mast, his lack of power, wealth, and title had been all that mattered. And when she’d shattered his heart, his work had given him strength and purpose.
As such, Sunday was any other day when business transactions were handled and ruthless meetings held. By a rule, the men he dealt with were ones who respected nothing and no one outside of their collections and coin in hand.
Standing at his sideboard, sipping his brandy, Vail stole another glance at the long-case clock. Forty minutes past six o’clock in the morning. Also, forty minutes later than the agreed upon time for his appointment. Generally, the thrill of an upcoming meeting, and the battle that would ensue over price and then the eventual trading of notes filled him with exhilaration. Particularly a discussion he’d been struggling to make a reality for more than three years now.
Lord Marlborough, an aging earl who had the largest, most revered collections in the whole of England was selling off the contents of his libraries. And he’d decided Vail, regardless of the coin he’d pay, was undeserving of his collection.
And yet, today, he remained oddly…detached from his appointment with Lord Marlborough. Where he should have his mind cleared, and be running through a script of that exchange justifying why he should receive first look at and right to purchase, instead he remained wholly distracted by thoughts of the young woman he’d fled from yesterday morning.
Bridget had challenged everything he’d believed to be fact where human nature was concerned. She’d insisted that there were shades that explained away a person’s avarice, greed, and any other vice they were guilty of. It spoke to her innocence. It spoke of a woman who didn’t deal with ugliness and evil and greed. A woman who, instead, on her day off slipped out the front door with a picnic basket and used a hired hack.
Frowning, he took a long swallow of his drink. Where in blazes had the lady been off to? Or rather…with whom? Those outings, though, usually took place later in the day, invariably occurring between gentlemen and young ladies. Vail clenched and unclenched his gloved hands in a reflexive gesture around his glass.
His office door opened and he looked up. “He’s livid,” Edward informed him, shutting the door.
He? He puzzled his brow.
His brother gave him a droll smile. “Marlborough. The Earl of Marlborough whom you’ve been angling for a meeting with for the better part of three years? I trust you remember the gentleman?”
What in blazes am I doing? Pondering a maid instead of his meeting. If ever there had been a doubt whom his sire, in fact, was, this was the proof. “Oh, I remember.” The first meeting between Vail and that miserable old bastard had come five years ago when he had set himself apart as one of the most ruthless, knowledgeable collectors. Marlborough had kept him waiting nearly an hour and, all the while, he’d no intention of selling to the Bastard Baron, as he’d spat on Vail’s way out. “He’ll wait another ten minutes,” he said quietly to himself. He was a master of restraint and control in all aspects of his life: from his business dealings to the lovers he took and he’d prided himself on that clear-headedness since Adrina’s betrayal all those years ago. He’d not compromise that for a quick-witted maid who was a master with his collections and proficient in more languages than Vail himself. Just as he’d not compromise his pride for a pompous lord like Marlborough. Ever since Vail had rejected a possible arrangement with the gentleman’s eldest daughter, the earl had ended all business transactions between him and Vail.
“The gentleman insists he’ll wait no more than another five,” Edward warned.
“Gentleman,” he muttered. There was nothing gentle, refined, or polite about the slender earl who hungered for old texts the way a glutton did prime steak. “He’ll wait,” he said, swirling his drink. Because his pride would not let him leave without ever receiving a proper greeting.
“I’m not in possession of your usual confidence this time,” Edward countered, shaking his head.
“He’ll wait,” Vail repeated. They always did. Some of them threatened to walk off, but the madness that gripped them always proved far greater. Vail had discovered that long ago, and had grown his power and his wealth as one of the most renowned booksellers because of it.
“Your efforts to rile a client are better reserved for when you’re selling. Need I remind you, today you’re seeking privileged rights from the earl?” Edward cast a nervous glance over at the clock.
If Edward believed Marlborough had any intention of giving Vail the first rights to his collections, then he wasn’t cut of the same ruthless cloth as men like him and the earl. Finishing his drink, Vail chuckled. “I’m always the seller.” He set his glass down on the mahogany sideboard. “That is the difference between me and them. I don’t give a jot for those books—”
“And Marlborough knows it.”
“—outside the coin they’ll fetch me,” he spoke over him. Nor was he so much a fool that he didn’t know precisely the reason the old earl had swallowed his pride and waited now for a meeting. For Marlborough, just like Stanwicke, Dunwithy, and every other rabid, antiquated text collector in London, was in want of a book—the same book. The Chaucer up for auction in three weeks’ time had created a frenzy among those gentlemen, eager for that coveted tome…even ancient collectors like Marlborough who was selling off his own works.
At the end of the proverbial day, those books were merely a means to a greater fortune…this one matters to you…and it is the most important because of it…
A little niggling started low in his belly and he scowled. What sorcery was Bridget Hamlet capable of that she’d have him standing here questioning his views on those works and, more, the way he’d lived his life all these years?
“Perhaps I’ll speak to him, once more.”
“Do not,” Vail called, staying him in his tracks. “I don’t want him appeased.” He’d sat through the earl’s insults and taunting years ago. He’d not deny himself a long overdue exchange, where he was in control.
“Bloody hell, Vail,” Edward muttered, checking the time once again.
As an appreciator of those fine texts, his younger brother, for all his business acumen, was more alike many of those collectors than Vail. Taken under the wing of one of his mother’s late protectors, he’d benefited from a fine education at Eton and Oxford and, in turn, used those skills to shape his way in the world. Vail, however, had been schooled by tutors in rooms of the townhouses rented by whatever lover was keeping his mother. He’d not seen education as anything more than a way out of the uncertain life his mother had known.
Silence, punctuated by the ticking of the clock, stretched on. At last, the clock struck forty minutes past the hour. “I’m going,” he said brusquely, pushing away from the sideboard.
“About bloody time,” Edward grumbled. “There are other ways to woo a buyer, you know,” he called after him.
“I’m not trying to woo him.”
“You should.”
Vail found his way through the townhouse and onward to the largest of his Collection Rooms. The place where, just yesterday, he’d shared parts of himself with Bridget that he’d never shared with another. Her veiled, but subtle, challenge to how he’d run his business and how he’d lived his life rang in his mind, again. Rearing itself when it had no place in his head before a meeting with a man willing to toss down a fortune for his obsession.
Setting aside thoughts of Bridget Hamlet, Vail stepped inside the Collection Room.
“Forty minutes,” the earl thundered from his seat on the leather button sofa in the front of the room. The man jumped up quickly, for one his age. “You’d arrange a meeting at six o’clock in the goddamned morning and keep me waiting here?”
At first glance, one would only ever take the bespectacled, old earl as a bookish lord, without a spine in his back. Vail had learned early on that appearances were as deceiving as people themselves. “Marlborough,” he greeted with a veneer of false civility as he entered the room. “A pleasure as—”
“Don’t you give me a bloody word of civilities or pleasantries,” the man boomed, jabbing a finger at him. “After that insulting offer you made when we last met, I should have never bothered contacting you again.”
“And yet, you did.” He found wicked delight in pointing that out as he approached. The moment he’d learned of the Chaucer.
A ruddy flush stained the earl’s pale cheeks. And there is where he revealed the depth of his weakness. Vail took up a place behind his desk and reclined in a deliberately negligent pose, daring the other man to leave.
His cheeks ruddy, Lord Marlborough puffed out his narrow chest and, with stiff movements, claimed the spot opposite Vail. “You insulted me, Chilton.” He’d have to be deaf to miss the true source of his contention there—Marlborough’s spinster daughter, an avid book lover, whom the earl had hoped to coordinate a match with.
“I offered you a fair price,” he said, neatly focusing on the safer feud they’d fought: over DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Just over a century old, the book had hardly merited those accolades—at this time, and he’d been abundantly honest in that.
The earl sputtered. “A f-fair price? That work,” he jabbed a furious finger at the velvet sack upon the viewing table. “Is a literary masterpiece. Ran through four editions within its first year of print. Four.” He held up four ink-stained digits. “And fortunate for you, I’ve come with the purpose of allowing you to try and redeem yourself. You’ve the opportunity to add a first edition signed copy and the follow-up title, and you offered me two thousand pounds?”
This is what it was to be, then. A test. The bloody man hadn’t forgiven the slight of Vail declining a courtship of his daughter and, by this, he wagered he never would.
He flattened his mouth. “I’ve not invited you to speak on past grievances or your DeFoe.”
Some of the tension eased from the earl’s frame and he preened. “Ah, yes. You’d make your appeal for right of first refusal on my collection.”
The bastard was relishing this. Marlborough’s library would fetch upward of two hundred thousand pounds, and Vail’s driven desire to be the best at what he did. It had been dangled as a dowry for the man’s eldest daughter. Vail, however, had little interest in whoring himself for a fortune.
“First, we’ll talk about the copy of Crusoe you disrespected last time we met.”
Vail studied the earl’s set mouth, the triumphant glitter in his eyes. Vail’s own want of that collection…the need to be the greatest of the sellers, had driven him to dance the same proverbial dance. Staring at Marlborough, he at last faced the truth—the inevitable result would be a denial. Lord Marlborough had no more intention of granting him access and control of his cherished volumes than he did setting them all afire and burning his own townhouse down.
“Very well,” he drawled. “You wish to have me look again at DeFoe’s works?” He nodded for the earl to remove the articles he’d brought.
The earl eyed him with a deserved wariness and then, drawing on his gloves, set to taking out each of the four copies. He set them up on four wooden display stands, and turned to Vail. “Have a look?” Three syllables and yet they contained a world of jeering mockery.
Vail shoved lazily to his feet and, as he joined Marlborough at the tableside, he made a show of studying the works. All the while, he repressed the same fury that had driven him to pummel those boys who’d mocked him as a child. Whatever street he and his mother had called their temporary home had inevitably found him fending off attacks and taunting jibes over the origins of his birth. Until he’d met Huntly, he’d thought the world, as a whole, incapable of seeing him as anything but an extension of his mother’s occupation. After he’d gone to war, he’d vowed never again be an object of ridicule and shaped himself into a master of his own fate. He’d not ceded that for this priggish lord before him.
“Well?” the earl demanded.
“The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe?” he drawled. “With the dearth of praise it receives even now, I expected you were merely including it as free per an agreement.”
Lord Marlborough froze, and then shot his eyebrows up. A moment later, the earl unleashed a stinging diatribe on Vail’s ancestry.